


Stories of the Street

by JustSemiotics



Series: The Leonard Cohen Variations [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Leonard Cohen - Freeform, Sherlock´s POV, Songfic, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 03:56:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustSemiotics/pseuds/JustSemiotics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees them all the time.<br/>All the stories of all the strangers in the street:<br/>Occasionally a drama, often a tragedy, sometimes a comedy, seldomly a poem,<br/>but always, always there are words inside his skull. </p><p> </p><p>Part of the "Amnesty" Let´s Write Sherlock Challenge. I choose the Songs. Obviously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories of the Street

He sees them all the time. All the stories of all the strangers in the street: Occasionally a drama, often a tragedy, sometimes a comedy, seldomly a poem but always, always there are words inside his skull. 

A typewriter is constantly hammering behind his cranium, writing letter after letter over every layer of the world. He is stuck with reading the sentences as he builds them. 

Down in the streets a girl on a bike squeals. Immediately the lever comes down and he can read her story in his head: A cherished peace in the secret place under the Corylus Avellana and a way to escape. On the white walls inside his skull is written 

lonelyboringdaring

He might go into one of rooms and read the stories on the walls. He tries to erase them, transcribes the letters with new letters, another story of a stranger walking by: The old polish man, a miner, immigrated with his wife, lost her 

threateningboringguilty

He always sees the typewriter´s letters, lowercase, small font, neat and precise on all the spaces in his head, going round and round. With the snip of a finger an „a“ is thrown away, as he begins to clean the rooms. The infinite script on the edge of the ceiling 

heliumneonargonkryptonxenonradon

He nearly loses is balance on the windowsill when a „boring“ resists removal despite all his best efforts. It isn´t as if he could push much in his current state, neither in his head nor physically. Getting up to the window in his London hotel room was tedious and took most of his time and strength. And the typewriter is writing the story of each crack in the frame, of each drop that was spilled on the sill

poetlovingboringdrunk

Desperately for distraction he grabs some of the the bigger paragraphs and puts them into the long binders on the shelves in the white rooms. His war is over and he had given away some of his letters. Seven of them, the spaces forming words on the silent screen of his phone:

„I live, S.H.“ 

And the typewriter added: 

pleasepleaseplease

Time has already stretched out for far too long and he now measures it by the amount of stories passing by. There is a shriek outside and suddenly he can´t bear to read another tale and runs. On the streets the stories keep floating around him, wrapping him up, tugging at him. He flees beneath the surface, hoping he kept the time correctly. 

The subway station is a broken library, fragments, short stories, articles and commentaries rushing around him, shoving him as he searches for the one poem he remembers by heart:

sand and flint  
so small between the stars  
and laughter  
so large against the sky  
and my name the way you say it

The man in the green parka turns. Sherlock tries to catch his eyes. Lowercase, page after page, the typewriter clicks: 

johnjohnjohnjohnjohnjohnjohn

**Author's Note:**

> I Of course I used the Amnesty to write another Leonard Cohen fic. This one is written in a more stylistic way - what do you think? 
> 
> II And I gave Sherlock ticker-tape synesthesia, a form where every word you hear is "written" in your mind and you can read them. As all forms of synesthesia it is involuntary, but ticker-tape actually helps in remembering and constructing language.


End file.
